Real-time updates are no longer a "nice-to-have" feature. Most modern UI applications expect live data streams of some kind from the server. For years, the go-to answer in the .NET ecosystem has been SignalR. While SignalR is incredibly powerful, it's nice to have other options for simpler use cases.

With the release of ASP.NET Core 10, we finally have a native, high-level API for Server-Sent Events (SSE). It bridges the gap between basic HTTP polling and full-duplex WebSockets via SignalR.